if a single light quantum is considered it is not possible to predict whether it passes through the prism or whether it will be reflected. It is clear that, no matter what a light quantum may be, a concrete experience is necessary to determine how it will behave.
(Chwistek 1948)
This uncertainty is at the heart of Professor Luce’s experiment. Quantum mechanics is often interpreted to imply that a singular quantum event is entirely indeterminate. Since the theory only speaks of statistical probabilities, we cannot know in advance what any single photon will do. According to the predominant Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, this represents an epistemological limit: a restriction in what it is possible for us to know. No conclusion is drawn about the nature of the quantum particles themselves.
Such a state of affairs has disturbed many physicists, starting with Einstein himself. Chwistek points out that “the fact that it is impossible to predict definite phenomena, does not prove that these phenomena are not determined.” And indeed, physicists have made many efforts over the years to discover “hidden variables” that would restore determinism to the quantum world, and make what is there knowable in principle. The question is still unsettled; but it is fair to say that, thus far, none of these hidden variable theories have been generally accepted.
At the other extreme, some researchers have sought to give quantum indeterminacy a positive ontological status, rather than regarding it negatively, as just an epistemological limit. We might compare this to the way that Meillassoux transforms Kant’s epistemological limit – the necessary unknowability of things in themselves – into a positive noumenal ontology, by “put[ting] back into the thing itself” the very unreason, or unavoidable contingency, that “we mistakenly took to be an incapacity in thought.” In this way, Meillassoux’s entire line of reasoning can be seen as a massive hyperbole of the argument for the positive ontological status of quantum indeterminacy. Most notably, John Conway and Simon Kochen propose a “Strong Free Will Theorem” of quantum mechanics, which
asserts, roughly, that if indeed we humans have free will, then elementary particles already have their own small share of this valuable commodity. More precisely, if the experimenter can freely choose the directions in which to orient his apparatus in a certain measurement, then the particle’s response (to be pedantic – the universe’s response near the particle) is not determined by the entire previous history of the universe.
(Conway and Kochen 2009)
Harness seems to anticipate this line of thought. If Professor Luce is free to set the angle of his Nichol prism at exactly 45°, then the photon he releases is free either to reflect or to refract. This parallel implies a certain degree of anthropomorphism: particles have precisely as much (or as little) “free will” as human beings do. Indeed, Prentiss notes that “I think it was Schrödinger who said that these physical particles were startlingly human in many of their aspects.” In any case, the premise of Luce’s experiment is that the photon, sent by itself through the apparatus, “will have no reason for selecting one [alternative] in preference to the other.” It will find itself in a situation where it has no grounds for action; its decision is entirely gratuitous. No antecedent cause can push it one way or the other, or give it any sort of motive. This could be called an existentialism of the quantum realm. And indeed, it seems that subatomic particles avoid making decisions in such circumstances, if this is at all possible. In the famous double-slit experiment, for instance, the photon evades the burden of choice by going through both slits at once. But in Luce’s experiment, there is no way to equivocate; the lone photon – unlike a whole swarm of photons – cannot be both reflected and refracted.
The question, therefore, is “how does a single photon make up its mind – or the photonic equivalent of a mind – when the probability of reflecting is exactly equal to the probability of refracting?” I presume that, if Luce’s experiment could actually be carried out, the photon would arbitrarily select one or the other of the two possibilities, despite the lack of any reason (or any physical cause) to do so. But in the story, the photon – like the rat in Luce’s earlier experiment – is not able to decide at all:
It will be a highly confused little photon … He’ll be puzzled; and trying to meet a situation for which he has no proper response, he’ll slow down. And when he does, he’ll cease to be a photon, which must travel at the speed of light or cease to exist. Like your rat, like many human beings, he solves the unsolvable by disintegrating.
(Harness 1950)
The photon, in effect, has a nervous breakdown. It is paralyzed. This demonstrates what Meillassoux calls the factiality, or contingency, of the correlation. Once even a single entity fails to correlate properly, the entire correlationist circle is ruptured. The law of the conservation of mass-energy is violated; and with that, the entire “Einstein space-time continuum” falls apart. Space and time (what Kant calls the “pure forms of sensible intuitions in general”) no longer cohere; organizing concepts like identity and causality (what Kant calls the Categories, or “pure forms of the understanding”) are no longer applicable:
Time had suddenly become a barricade rather than an endless road … Luce had separated this fleeting unseen dimension from the creatures and things that had flowed along it. There is no existence without change along a temporal continuum. and now the continuum had been shattered.
(Harness 1950)
What happens once the phenomenal world is broken into pieces, so that everything reverts to its noumenal essence? For Meillassoux, the “great outdoors” of things in themselves is “an absolute that is at once external to thought and in itself devoid of all subjectivity” as of all life: a materiality that is “dead through and through” (“Iteration, Reiteration”). The story could well have ended here, in the void, at a point of unresolved horror. But it doesn’t. Instead, Harness whimsically portrays the noumenal world as the Garden of Eden. Prentiss’ noumenal self is Adam (which is in fact his first name); his lover E, of course, is the noumenal Eve. As for Luce, he is revealed to be Lucifer, “a huge coiling serpent thing! … the noumenon, the essence, of Luce – was nothing human … and therefore never had been.”
Followers of Meillassoux might well protest that the Garden of Eden is itself an all-too-human, correlationist myth. It is a world supposedly created for its human inhabitants, and perfectly fitted to them. But that would be to forget both the absence of God in Harness’ scheme, and the inhuman presence of Luce, the serpent. “The New Reality” cannot be read in conventionally religious or moralistic terms. The story rather dramatizes a tug of war between two human tendencies: one that is “incorrigibly curious,” while the other is “incorrigibly, even neurotically, conservative.” The one side motivates scientific research, while the other is embodied in the Bureau of the Censor. The struggle between these two principles is unbalanced, however, by a third, inhuman element.
In the vision of “The New Reality,” therefore, science is driven by an unquenchable demand that is at best indifferent, and at worst inimical, to human existence. As the philosopher Ray Brassier puts it, “thinking has interests that do not coincide with those of living” (Nihil Unbound). Science pursues its inhuman interests whenever it seeks to explain the world, rather than just accepting it. The same Promethean impulse – an apocalyptic rage for unveiling – leads Luce and his “family” both to produce the ever-more convoluted and complexified structures of phenomenal reality, and to rupture those structures. Despite Kant, we are forced to recognize that phenomenal elaboration and noumenal unveiling are two sides of the same coin. With the serpent in the Garden, not to mention “the seductive scent of apple blossoms” with which the story ends, we can be sure that the correlationist cycle will start all over again. As the wise psychologist Speer remarks at one point in the story,
whenever man [sic] grows discontented with his present reality, he starts elaborating it … How long do you think [the inhabitants of the noumenal realm] can resist the te
mptation to alter it? If Prentiss is right, eventually they or their descendants will be living in a cosmos as intricate and unpleasant as the one they left.
(Harness 1950)
Chapter 2
The Thing Itself
It is unlikely that an actual experience of the thing in itself, even if it were somehow possible, would be Edenic, as it is for Adam in “The New Reality.” For given such an ontological catastrophe, nobody – not even trained ontologists – would actually be able to “get through.” This is one of the lessons of Adam Roberts’ 2015 novel The Thing Itself: a work, much like “The New Reality,” of Kantian science fiction (Roberts 2015). The novum of The Thing Itself is a computer technology that allows us to push beyond the Kantian forms of intuition (space and time) and categories of the understanding (causality and all the rest), in order to get closer to the thing in itself. Roberts’ novel extrapolates, not only from the existing state of AI (artificial intelligence) research, but more crucially from the philosophical presuppositions of that research.
Approaching the noumenon means straining toward a point at which the forms and categories that normally order my experience all break down. I am left – if not quite with nothing whatsoever – then at the very least with nothing positive, nothing with which I could orient and compose myself. Language stumbles and hesitates at the approach of a noumenal reality that stands outside any sort of cognitive or epistemological categorization:
It is very hard to put into words … I saw – what I saw. Data experiences of a radically new kind. Raw tissues of flesh, darkness visible, a kind of fog (no: fog is the wrong word). A pillar of fire by night, except that “it” did not burn, or gleam, or shine. “It” is the wrong word for it …
There was a hint of – I’m going to say, claws, jaws, a clumping something. A maw. Not a tentacle, nothing so defined. Nor was it darkness …
(Roberts 2015)
What happens when language falters, together with the world to which that language is bound, and which it endeavors to describe? Such is the predicament of Charles Gardner, the protagonist of The Thing Itself. In the opening chapter of the novel, Charles catches a glimpse “behind the veil” of phenomena – and suffers an existential collapse. In the depths of the Antarctic winter night, as he is dying from exposure to the “endless, implacable, killing cold,” he sees something – or better, he feels something: “a weird inward fillip, or lurch, or clonic jerk, or something folding over something else.” This movement is vague and indeterminate; but it is so powerful that Charles senses it both inwardly and outwardly: “all around me now, or all within me, or otherwise pressing very imminently upon my consciousness.” Space-time itself, it seems to him, undergoes a “convulsive, almost muscular contraction.” But just as suddenly as this strange experience comes upon him, it disappears again, and the phenomenal world returns: “everything folded over, and flipped back again. ‘It’, or ‘they’ were not here any longer.”
Charles isn’t really able to explain what it is that he saw or felt. No matter what word he uses, it is always “the wrong word.” For there are no right words, no better words. Charles is bombarded by novel sensoria (as “The New Reality” might call them): “data experiences of a radically new kind.” He cannot tell us what these new experiences are, but only what they are not – or at best, what they are not quite. He hesitates even as he explains, with pleonasms like “I saw – what I saw” and filler phrases like “I’m going to say.” Shaken, he shores up his account by quoting religious and poetic texts. He is forced to speak in oxymorons, nouns contradicted by their own adjectives: for example, “darkness visible” (from Paradise Lost). He proffers words only to negate them immediately afterwards: for example, a “pillar of fire” (from The Book of Exodus) that “did not burn, or gleam, or shine.” Pronouns like “it” and “they” are written in self-negating scare quotes, because they have no stable referents. And in any case, grammatical number (it vs. they) does not apply here: “the plural doesn’t really describe the circumstance. Not that there was only one, either.” After all, Unity and Plurality are themselves two of Kant’s 12 categories; they are only relevant for phenomena, not for the thing in itself.
In Charles’ delirium, the noumenon seems to be embodied, somehow. At least, it involves “raw tissues of flesh,” and also a “maw” (a gaping mouth, hence an embodied emptiness or absence). But Charles also insists that what he encounters is “not a tentacle, nothing so defined.” Here the novel alludes to what China Miéville describes as “Weird Fiction’s obsession with the tentacle” (Miéville 2009). This obsession develops throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; it culminates in H. P. Lovecraft’s hyperbolic evocations of such things as “mound-like tentacles groping from underground nuclei of polypous perversion” (“The Lurking Fear,” in Lovecraft 2005). The tentacle continues to feature prominently in weird fiction after Lovecraft, Miéville says, “until it is now, in the post-Weird debris of fantastic horror, the default monstrous limb-type” (Miéville 2009). The Thing Itself nods to this tradition, but also rejects it. For even the tentacle is all too definite an image, all too overly contained a shape. It is inadequate to the troubling noumenal reality – an existence entirely without categories – that it is supposed to figure.
Even as Charles draws upon the vocabulary and the affects of Lovecraftian horror, he more crucially references the nonsense of Lewis Carroll. For the noumenon is beyond all meaning or sense. The “hint of … claws, jaws” recalls “the jaws that bite, the claws that catch” of Carroll’s Jabberwocky. A few paragraphs later, Charles mentions a “boojummy whatever the hell”; he sarcastically adds that “I choose my words carefully, here.” The boojum comes from Carroll’s mock epic The Hunting of the Snark. The poem gives no clues as to what the boojum is like; it only warns that, if you encounter it, “You will softly and suddenly vanish away,/And never be met with again!” And this is what happens to all the characters at the end of the poem. The thing in itself is “boojummy” because it evades any sort of positive contact, let alone description – and yet it menaces us with annihilation if we are so unlucky as to stumble upon it nonetheless.
Charles survives his terrifying experience, just barely. But it ruins his life. He loses some fingers and toes to frostbite; more seriously, he is a victim of what can be called post-traumatic stress disorder (though the novel never actually uses this term). Charles has been through what Maurice Blanchot calls a limit-experience: that is to say, an “experience of non-experience,” a paradoxical experience of something that literally cannot be experienced (Blanchot 1993). I dread the prospect of death, but I cannot actually experience the event of my own death, since it is an occasion in which the “I” – the entity that experiences and remembers things – ceases to exist. Similarly, I cannot actually experience the thing in itself, however closely I approach it; since it stands outside what Kant calls the conditions of possibility that are necessary in order for me to have any sort of experience at all. A limit-experience grazes the boundaries of that which extinguishes all experience.
Charles has his brush with the thing in itself in 1986, while he is working at a scientific research station in the Antarctic, “hundreds of miles inland, far away from the nearest civilisation.” It is the middle of southern hemisphere winter, and therefore also the middle of the “(months-long) south polar night.” Charles’ job is “to process the raw astronomical data coming in from Proxima and Alpha Centauri,” in order to determine if there are any signs of “alien life.” He is alone, except for one other researcher: Roy Curtius, the novel’s antagonist. Charles has his limit-experience when Roy tries to murder him, drugging him with sleeping pills, and then leaving him outdoors in the bitter cold.
It all happens because Roy is an avid reader of Kant. He is not very interested in the mission’s explicit goal of finding signs of life on some particular planet, like Proxima Centauri b (or like the exoplanets explicitly mentioned in the text: “Kepler-438b, Kepler-442b and Kepler-
440b”). Much more ambitiously, he wants to solve the Fermi Paradox altogether: the question of why we have never encountered any sort of extraterrestrial intelligence, even though the universe is filled with habitable planets upon which it might have arisen. After intensively studying The Critique of Pure Reason, Roy concludes that the Fermi Paradox is an artifact of our own overly parochial assumptions.
The problem, as Roy explains it, is entirely a Kantian one. We are trying to find aliens within the framework of the universe as we ourselves grasp and define it. This means that we are trapped in the vicious circle of our own anthropocentric assumptions:
We look out from our planet and see a universe of space, and time, of substance and causality, of plurality and totality, of possibility and probability – and we forget that what we’re actually seeing are the ways our minds structure the Ding an sich according to the categories of space, and time, of substance and causality, of plurality and totality, of possibility and probability.
(Roberts 2015)
In effect, Roy describes what Quentin Meillassoux calls the “correlationist circle” of modern thought (Meillassoux 2008). The Kantian categories get in the way of my ability to encounter anything genuinely alien, anything from the “great outdoors,” anything “that is not a correlate of my thought.” For why should the minds of extraterrestrials order the cosmos in the same manner as our own minds do? “There’s no reason why aliens should share our maths, or our physics, or our apperceptions of space and time.” Extraterrestrials’ phenomenal experience might well be radically different from ours, because their minds process noumenal reality in a different way than ours do. “Surely there are aliens. Of course there are! But they don’t live in our minds. They live in the Ding an sich.” We will never encounter the aliens in our own conceptual space, where we can only find what we ourselves have placed there in the first place. It’s like “peering down the microscope and seeing your own eye reflected in the lens.”
Extreme Fabulations Page 3